Chris Davis isn’t about to admit he’s chasing a home run record. At least not yet.

But if he were to get hot again like he did when he slugged 12 homers in June, the Orioles’ first baseman isn’t shy about declaring that 61 would be his magic number.

Sure, even that number comes with an asterisk because Roger Maris needed a 162-game season to accomplish what Babe Ruth did in 154.

It just doesn’t compare at all to the scarlet letters – PEDs – draped across the numbers that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa put up in the summer of 1998 and later topped by Barry Bonds.

At least not to Chris Davis, who, like so many of us, followed this generation’s great home run chase in awe as a middle-schooler in Longview, Texas.

“Yeah, I watched it; I thought it was awesome,” Davis said last week during the Orioles' two-game stay at Petco Park. “I thought it was great for baseball to see two guys hitting a home run every night, chasing each other. Come to find out what happened, it was a little disheartening.

“But it is what it is, man. Those guys made their own decision. They are grown men, and now they have to live with what they’ve done.”

The same goes, Davis said, for the 13 players suspended last week for their ties to the Miami anti-aging clinic, including the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez for 211 games and the Padres’ Everth Cabrera for 50.

News like that has everything to do with Davis having to defend himself every time he launches a ball over a fence.

He’s a hulking, 6-foot-3, 240-pound specimen who is sitting on 43 homers and 110 RBIs – in early August, no less – and the state of the game apparently has fans asking all the questions that no one dared whisper in a clubhouse 15 years ago.

“Are you on steroids?” one fan posited safely over Twitter earlier this season.

Davis made headlines with a one-word reply – “No.”

“I think at first it was a little frustrating to think that I was just, you know, automatically lumped into that group because I’ve had a lot of production this year,” Davis said. “But you can’t control what people are going to think and what they say, and for me, I have nothing to hide.

“I’ve done everything the right way as far as the game is concerned. You just go about your business every day.”

Today, that business unfortunately includes answering questions about PEDs, tainted stats – "I still feel 61 is the record," he said – and players ensnared in the latest scandal.

In the days after the announcements of last week’s suspensions, the mere mention of the subject fetched a few groans and expletives in the visiting clubhouse at Petco Park last week (we can’t be sure if they were directed at the reporter or the suspended players).